Novel Platforms for Genetic Analysis: An Assessment of Rapid, Portable Diagnostic Devices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pioneered simultaneously in Denmark and the United States in the early 1990s, consensus conferencing is a relatively new tool for consulting the public on a wide range of issues. A consensus conference involves members of the lay public and gives them the central role in assessing a problem area. Participants rarely have subject expertise that is directly relevant to the topic being explored and contribute by making their views known in the form of concerns, values, and everyday experiences. The underlying purpose of a consensus conference is to provide a means by which ordinary (lay) members of society can be involved in a purposeful way in making their views known to regulators, industrial actors, scientists, and politicians. Consensus conferencing often involves an examination of science and issues and is seen as a way to reinvigorate democratic decision making by including the public upstream in the development of science and technology, rather than after-the-fact. Additionally, it is a tool for building trust and for creating a more open and transparent dialogue. In Canada, consensus conferencing has been used previously to explore topics like genetically modified foods, plant molecular farming, and blood safety. Other countries have used consensus conferencing on topics like nanotechnology (USA), telecommunications and teleworking (USA and Denmark), national electricity policy (Switzerland), and radioactive waste management (UK). Consensus conferencing is about building consensus. Since consensus refers to agreement, the results of a consensus conference are a record of group decisions, and represent positions and recommendations that participants can live with. It is therefore fundamental to the success of a consensus conference that the process for getting to a certain degree of general agreement occurs in an environment which promotes inclusivity, participation, cooperation, egalitarianism, and a willingness to be solution oriented. The purpose of a consensus conference is to produce an informed debate on a limited subject and to produce statements and recommendations that reflect the nature of the deliberations. As such, this document reflects the views of 22 adult Canadians from coast-to-coast, and across all age ranges. Participants were selected in one of three ways: (1) responses from a series of advertisements in the Globe and Mail newspaper, (2) random digit telephone recruitment using quota sampling, and (3) snowball sampling to fill in demographic gaps. In general, participants were non-specialists who were motivated to understand the importance of the issues, and were not meant to reflect a perfectly random assortment of Canadians. The topic of this consensus conference was the development of rapid, portable, low-cost diagnostic devices. Such devices are being developed in many parts of the world, and utilize micro-fluidics, electrical fields, micro-scale pumps, and fluorescence technologies to analyze biological samples including blood, urine, water, etc. Such devices have been called various names including micro-fluidic platform technology and lab-on-chip technology. These devices, and the glass and silicon chips that are used with them, will provide point of care and point of concern testing that may usher in a new age of testing and monitoring. This brings the functionality of a large-scale laboratory down to the size of a hand-held unit which can perform diagnostic testing, meter, measure and mix samples, move mixtures to temperature-controlled chambers, and separate and analyze results. By taking advantage of favourable scaling properties and a small footprint, this promises to improve the availability of diagnostic and genetic testing, environmental monitoring, and several other clinical and non-clinical applications. Clearly, such has many risks and benefits associated with its use, and also raise a range of socio-economic and ethical issues. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".